Central Europeans wary of EU

Support dwindling in Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland

PRAGUE, Czech Republic — The Poles worry that wealthy Germans will come in and buy up all the choice real estate.

Hungarians fear that strict immigration controls will force them to seal their borders against more than 3 million ethnic Hungarians who live outside the country.

Czechs are concerned that the European Union's finicky health and hygiene regulations will ruin the beer.

Enthusiasm for joining the European club has dampened considerably in the three countries widely regarded as front-runners for EU membership sometime in the middle of this decade.

In the Czech Republic, opinion surveys indicate that support for joining the EU has dipped below 50 percent, while opposition has grown to 25 percent.

Opposition is strongest in Poland, where 30 percent now say the country would be better off without the EU.

Eagerness to join gone

This is a startling turnaround from the days immediately after the collapse of communism, when Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic were tripping over each other trying to be first in line for membership in NATO and the EU.

All three were accepted into NATO in 1999, which went a long way toward satisfying their need to sever the psychological ties with the former Soviet Union and relink with Western Europe. Joining the EU, with its reams of regulations and rigorous economic benchmarks, suddenly does not seem quite so urgent as it once did.

Political leaders in each of the candidate countries--a group that also includes Slovenia, Slovakia and the three Baltic states--remain firmly committed to the principle of EU accession.

But Gustav Molnar, a political analyst with the Laszlo Teleki Institute, a Budapest think tank, notes a worrisome disconnect between what politicians are saying and what is happening on the ground.

Opinion vs. politics

"There is a growing gap between public opinion and the political class," he said. "The Poles and the Czechs are the most skeptical, perhaps because of their historic fear of German domination. The problem in Hungary is that most of our politicians have this rather outdated idea that the union is a collection of nation-states. They don't realize how rapidly it's moving toward a real federal superstate."

The EU's main attraction for the post-communist countries was always economic. The EU was equated with Western Europe's prosperity and its higher living standards.

But now that candidate countries are faced with 80,000 pages of EU laws and regulations that have to be adopted and enforced, some sectors are beginning to fear that joining the EU may actually cost them money.

Poland's small farmers, who make up about 20 percent of the national workforce, are a prime example. Mainly in the poorer eastern provinces of the country, many of these farmers still hitch their plows to horses. They will not be eligible for EU price supports nor will they be able to compete with the efficient industrialized farms of Western Europe. When import barriers come down, they will be faced with ruin.

On the other side of the country, Poles are acutely aware of the wealth gap between themselves and their German neighbors.

Wealth gap

Houses and prime agricultural acreage on the Polish side of the border cost about one-third of what they would go for on the German side, stirring fears that Germans will come in and buy back what they lost after World War II when Poland's borders were shifted westward.

As a result, the Polish government is asking for an 18-year exemption from the EU rule that allows citizens of one country to freely buy property in another. The Czechs, fearing German revanchism in the Sudetenland, are asking for a similar moratorium.

A more immediate reason for the growing mood of Euroskepticism, according to Karel Muller, a political scientist at Prague's Charles University, is that competition in the free market is turning out to be far more bruising than most people expected, especially for those people who came of age in non-competitive socialist systems.

"We are finding out that we are really very backward, that we are lagging behind in every respect," Muller said.

"Only about a third of the businesses here are competitive by EU standards, and these generate almost all of our GDP. Another third have no prospects, and the one-third in the middle are being kept alive for social reasons," he said.

"The reality is that when foreign companies come here, they're only interested in hiring people under 30. It means that half the population is out of the game," he said.

Another reality is that when the EU extends its borders eastward, Poland and Hungary will face new responsibilities for securing Europe's frontiers against its less fortunate neighbors.

The issue is particularly touchy in Hungary, where large Hungarian minorities in Ukraine, Romania and Yugoslavia likely will be stuck on the wrong side of the prosperity divide for a long time to come.